"Shortlisted for the ICAS Book Prize in Social Sciences, International Convention of Asia Scholars" Tariq Omar Ali is assistant professor of history at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
Before the advent of synthetic fibers and cargo containers, jute sacks were the preferred packaging material of global trade, transporting the world's grain, cotton, sugar, tobacco, coffee, wool, guano, and bacon. Jute was the second-most widely consumed fiber in the world, after cotton. While the sack circulated globally, the plant was cultivated almost exclusively by peasant smallholders in a small corner of the world: the Bengal delta. This book examines how jute fibers entangled the delta's peasantry in the rhythms and vicissitudes of global capital.
Taking readers from the nineteenth-century high noon of the British Raj to the early years of post-partition Pakistan in the mid-twentieth century, Tariq Omar Ali traces how the global connections wrought by jute transformed every facet of peasant life: practices of work, leisure, domesticity, and sociality; ideas and discourses of justice, ethics, piety, and religiosity; and political commitments and actions. Ali examines how peasant life was structured and restructured with oscillations in global commodity markets, as the nineteenth-century period of peasant consumerism and prosperity gave way to debt and poverty in the twentieth century.
A Local History of Global Capital traces how jute bound the Bengal delta's peasantry to turbulent global capital, and how global commodity markets shaped everyday peasant life and determined the difference between prosperity and poverty, survival and starvation. "Ali provides an accessible and highly original study of peasant involvement in jute production and its ramifications for agrarian culture and politics in eastern Bengal. Superbly written and thoroughly researched, A Local History of Global Capital brings a series of fresh insights to the agrarian history of colonial South Asia."-Douglas E. Haynes, author of Small Town Capitalism in Western India: Artisans, Merchants and the Making of the Informal Economy, 1870–1960 "This is a fantastic book. Ali shows how an agrarian society that bears many of the conventional markers of what development theory construes as 'backwardness'-peasant production, overt religiosity, illiteracy-must in fact be understood as squarely located in capitalist modernity."-Andrew Sartori, author of Liberalism in Empire: An Alternative History
